My agenda is multivalent: I am an old-fashioned
philologist who finds Freud often relevant and sometimes persuasive,
a feminist who finds structuralism the best starting point for the
analysis of a myth, a heterosexual Jewish woman who was raised a
Communist and has come to be more interested in the imagination
than in what other people call “real life.” The protagonist
of e. e. cummings’s him declares three props of his essence:
“I am an Artist, I am a Man, I am a Failure.” My triad
is “I am a Sanskritist, I am a woman, I am an insomniac.”
I am by training an Indologist, by choice a mythologist, and by
nature interested in bedtricks.

I bring very different competencies to the different genres and
cultures invoked in this book, beginning with my training as a Sanskritist
and student of Indian literature. India, particularly Hinduism,
is not only the culture that I know best, after my own (in some
ways, better than my own), but the culture that I suspect of having
the best stories; India has variations of mythological themes for
which my own traditions do not even have themes. I have presented
the Indian texts in this book in much more detail than the European
and American texts, in part because I know the Indian texts best
and like them best but also because I assume that most of my readers
know the European texts better and have better access to them.

But the meanings of the Indian stories extend into and are often
clarified and deepened by European legends, novels, and films. My
second qualification to write this book is my insomnia, which began
at roughly the same time as my interest in storytelling and accounts
for a good deal of my knowledge of English literature (particularly
Shakespeare) and all of my knowledge of B movies. I am not a scholar
of films; I don’t study the old silent ones or many foreign
films, nor do I keep up with the latest Hollywood trends in horror
and mutilation; I am an American Movie Classic buff. I watch films
but do not read much about them besides Leslie Halliwell and David
Thomson; for me films are primary texts, and all I can contribute
to the study of film is their classical mythological context. I
earned the red badge of bloodshot eyes watching the Late Late Late
Show with my mother, and I sometimes feel that I ought to win the
literary equivalent of the Croix de Guerre for sitting through not
only the many truly terrible films about bedtricks on “late
Thursday/early Friday” television but the advertisements for
used cars and phone sex (some of which also offer doubles) that
punctuate them — until, at last, the coup de grâce is
administered at dawn, to the appropriate military strains of “The
Star Spangled Banner.” (I also owe to my mother my love of
opera, whose plots share with B movies the dubious privilege
of providing a happy retirement home for mythological kitsch.) (preface,
p.xxii-xxiii)

from Carnal Knowledge:

The bedtrick is an exercise in epistemology: How could you know?
How could you not know? The answer to the question, “Is
it the same person?” will be expressed differently according
to the different points of view of several different characters
within the story. The very premise of the bedtrick is that there
are two different points of view about the identity of the masquerader:
that of the trickster who plays the bedtrick and knows the true
identity of both partners, and that of the victim who is the object
of the bedtrick and does not know the identity of the bedtrickster.
In the case of inadvertent bedtricks, where neither the trickster
nor the victim knows that a bedtrick is taking place, only we, the
audience, and the author, know the truth. And sometimes the narrative
forces us, the readers or hearers, to change our point of view mid-stream,
even several times, as we discover that the protagonist (or the
author) has been hiding something from us. (p.17)

from Splitting the Diference: Gender and Myth in Ancient
Greece and India:

Hindu and Greek mythologies teem with gendered narratives of doubling
and bifurcation, stories that people (mostly but certainly not only
men) have told about other people (mostly but certainly not only
women) who have been split in half in various ways: split into an
original and a double or a male and a female (in tales of androgyny
and/or bisexuality), or severed head from body (or mind from body,
soul from body, or left from right), or seduced by gods who appear
as the doubles of mortals. These stories address questions that
concern many different cultures, including our own: What is the
connection between rape and the fantasy of the double? Why do the
women depicted in myths fool men more than men fool women? How can
you tell a human from a god? Why prefer a human lover or spouse
to a god? What is the mythological source of the expression, "Put
a bag over her head”?

The part of my title that might, with some indulgence, be called
postcolonic (Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India)
sets out an agenda that is double in several respects: I intend
to discuss the duality, the two-ness, of two genders
(male and female) of two bodies of creatures (mortal and
immortal) in two bodies of mythology (from ancient India
and Greece). I will trace each set of texts from the earliest textual
period (the Vedas in India, Homer in Greece) roughly to the present,
in contemporary India and Europe, touching down in passing in Victorian
England (where the cultures of India and Greece interacted vividly
with England at the hub of the empire) and sometimes invoking in
the conclusions stories from other cultures as well, including “double
features” from the Hammer Studio variants of Jekyll and
Hyde to John Woo’s Face/Off. (p.1)

from The Implied Spider:

In this first chapter I will consider the metaphor of the microscope
and the telescope in the functions and the analysis of myths, and
will demonstrate my method by comparing texts from two traditions,
the Hebrew Bible and Hindu mythology. Let me begin by arguing that
the microscopic and telescopic levels are intrinsically combined
within the myths themselves.

One way to begin to define myth is to contextualize it on a continuum
of all the narratives constructed of words (poems, realistic fiction,
histories, and so forth) — all the various forms of narrations
of an experience. If we regard this textual continuum as a visual
spectrum, we may use the metaphor of the microscope and/or telescope
to epitomize the extreme ends of this narrative vision. The end
of the continuum that deals with the entirely personal (a realistic
novel, or even a diary), the solipsistic (“This never happened
to anyone but me”), is the microscope; this is where I would
situate a dream or the entirely subjective retelling of an experience.
Some novels on this end of the continuum may be contrasted with
myths in several respects. These novels depend on the individual;
character is all important; these novels say, this could only happen
to this one person or at least only did happen to this one person.
In most myths, by contrast, character, except in the broadest terms
(young or old, wise or foolish), doesn’t count at all; myths
say, this could happen to anyone. (p.7)

On this continuum between the personal and the abstract, myth vibrates
in the middle; of all the things made of words, myths span the widest
range of human concerns, human paradoxes. Epics too, so closely
related to myths, have as their central theme the constant interaction
of the two planes, the human and the divine, as the gods constantly
intervene in human conflicts. Myths range from the most highly detailed
(closest to the personal end of the continuum) to the most stripped
down (closest to the artificial construct at the abstract end of
the continuum); and each myth may be rendered by the scholar in
its micro- or macro- form. If prose is general and translatable,
poetry particular and untranslatable, myth is prose at its most
general, which is one of the reasons why Lévi-Strauss was
able to claim that the essence of myth, unlike the essence of poetry,
is translatable. (p.9)

The human instinct, the common sense, that resists the theological
argument that we are unreal is a political instinct; but there are
also ways in which political narratives offer us a telescope not
to turn us away from our own lives but to turn us toward the lives
of others, including political others. Just as our theological vision
is opened up by myths like those discussed above, so too our political
vision may be opened up by our own myths; by the juxtaposition of
certain texts with the events of our lives; by the comparison of
myths from other cultures; and, most of all, by the interaction
of political and theological texts acting as lenses for one another.
In such texts, theology and politics become lenses for each other;
we see each differently, better, through the insights of the other.
Here again, if one should ask of politics and theology, “Which
is the reality?” the answer is “Yes.” (p.19)

We can use these lenses either to see or to blur a world that we
cannot fathom. In great myths, the microscope and the telescope
together provide a parallax that allows us to see ourselves in motion
against the stream of time, like stars viewed from two different
ends of the earth’s orbit, one of the few ways to see the
stars move. And when we take into account myths not, perhaps, from
different ends of the earth’s orbit, but at least from different
ends of the earth, we have made our mythical micro-telescope a bit
longer than the one provided by our own cultures, and we can use
it to see farther inside and also farther away — a double helix
of the human paradox. To jump ahead to the argument that I will
make in subsequent chapters, not just for myths but for comparative
mythology, the individual text is the microscope that lets us see
the trees; the comparison is the telescope that lets us see the
forest. The myth allows us to look through both ends of the human
kaleidoscope at once, simultaneously to view the personal, the details
that make our lives precious to us, through the microscope of our
own eye and, through the telescope provided by the eye of other
cultures, to view the vast panorama that dwarfs even the grand enterprises
of great powers, that dwarfs the sufferings of Job and of ourselves.
Every time we listen to a story with mythic dimensions, about human
beings in crisis, and really listen and think about the ways in
which it is telling us the story of our own lives — and not
the story of our own lives — we see for a moment with the double
vision of the human microscope and cosmic telescope. (p.25)

My aim is an expansive, humanistic outlook on inquiry that enhances
our humanity in both its peculiarity and its commonality. I am unwilling
to close the comparatist shop just because it is being picketed
by people whose views I happen, by and large, to share. I have become
sensitized to the political issues, but I do not think that they
ultimately damn the comparative enterprise. I want to salvage the
broad comparative agenda even if I acquiesce, or even participate,
in the savaging of certain of its elements. I refuse to submit to
what Umberto Eco has nicely termed “textual harrassment”
and Velcheru Narayana Rao calls (in Sanskrit) bhava-hatya,
literally “ideacide” but in actuality a good translation
for “ideology”: murder by idea, as well as the murder
of ideas (Sanskrit compounds, like myths, can swing both ways like
that). I am not now, and have never been, a card-carrying member
of the British Raj. But I refuse to stop reading and translating
texts edited by people who were. There is much in the colonial scholarship
on India that is worth keeping; I am unwilling to throw out the
baby with the bathwater. As the irrepressible Lee Siegel put it
recently, “Those hegemonic, imperialist, Eurocentric colonialists
were such amazing writers and they knew so much more about India
than all of us. They could ride horses, too.”

But there is also much in the postcolonial critique that is worth
keeping; indeed, we can no longer think without it. We are aware,
willy-nilly, of how our texts have come to us; they now say to us,
like third-world immigrants in England, “We’re here
because you were there.” Colonialism is no longer the political
force it once was, but it is still there, especially if we use a
word like imperialism instead of colonialism and bear in mind the
aspects of our scholarship that still invade the countries we study,
like the Coke bottle that intrudes into the lives of The Natives
in the (racist) film The Gods Must Be Crazy. In particular,
the postcolonial critique has made us aware of how deeply evolutionist
ideas are embedded in the history of comparison, and how hard we
must work to overcome them. The joke about the caveperson and the
tiger rests upon evolutionist ideas, as does, ultimately, the idea
of a common humanity. (p.68)

from Other People’s Myths:

This book is about the stories that people have told about others.
More precisely, it is concerned not so much with stories per
se as with stories about stories — metastories, or, more
specifically, metamyths. What do we learn from the stories that
we have told, and that other peoples have told, about the stories
that people tell? We learn something special when we focus on the
stories themselves, the myths: for myths, narratives, are not merely
the medium through which knowledge about others is transmitted.
Myths themselves are objects to be known; the medium of myths is
in one sense the message. Myths are about the human experiences
and events that we all share — birth, love, hate, death —
and one of those experiences or events is storytelling.
Storytelling is one of the few truly universal human bonds; people
in all times and places have sat down at night and told stories.
Putting together words to reproduce events that engage the emotions
of the listener is surely a form of art that ranks among the great
human experiences. (p.1)

from Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities:

This is a book about myths, dreams, and illusion. It is about the
ways in which they are alike, the ways in which they are different,
and what each teaches us about reality. Transformations of one sort
or another are at the heart of myths; Ovid called his great compendium
of Greek and Roman mythology Metamorphoses. Transformations
are particularly characteristic of the great Hindu myths, and here
they may appear to take different forms: sometimes they are regarded
as actual changes in the physical nature of the world, sometimes
as illusions, sometimes as dreams, sometimes as temporary magic
changes in the physical nature of the world, sometimes as the unveiling
of another level of reality. If the storyteller sets out to tell
a tale of illusion, various transformations may seem to take place,
in waking life or in dreams, but in the end we cannot tell whether
anything has happened or not. If the storyteller sets out to tell
a tale of dreams, he may relate events that seem to be physically
unreal but turn out, at last, to be real. If he sets out to tell
a tale of magic, he may describe some physical transformation that
a magician or a god actually caused to take place. And if he sets
out to tell a tale of revelation, he may describe events that peel
back the physical veil to reveal another, more mystical, reality
that was always there but not recognized.

These stories tend to blend into one another; a story that starts
out as a tale of magic, or even explicitly announces (as many do)
that it is going to be a tale of magic, may be transformed into
a tale of illusion. Sometimes it is only the genre of the story,
marked by the presence of certain motifs conventionally associated
with one sort of transformation or another, that lets us know whether
the story is intended to depict a dream or a magic show. These interactions
and interchanges are not the result of simple borrowing, back and
forth, between related themes. One sort of transformation often
becomes transformed, as it were, into another sort of transformation
in mid-story because one of the points of the story is to demonstrate
how difficult it is to tell one sort of transformation from another.
(p.3)

from Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts:

It is fashionable nowadays in writing about mythology to place
great emphasis on methodology, often almost to the exclusion of
content. A book that applies Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
technique to Australian mythology is looked to for proof or disproof
of the structuralist’s formulations rather than for new insights
into Australian mythology. It matters little what material you choose
to use, or what conclusions you draw from it, as long as you go
about it in the right way or, at any rate, in some consistent and
replicable way. (p.3)

In order to see the shape of a myth, one has to shine light on
it from as many different sides as possible in order to illuminate
its many various surfaces; in this way one establishes what philosophers
of science term the “robustness” of the objective structure
by showing that it is visible from a number of perspectives. Or,
to vary the metaphor, it is necessary to view the myth from several
different angles in order to find out where it is, just as, by photographing
a star from different angles, it is possible to use the parallax
of vision to watch it move against its background and hence to judge
its distance from us.

When the two reductionist tendencies reinforce each other, when
a single theory is used to extract a single meaning from a broad
corpus of myths, the result is a thread of truth that may be illuminating
when woven into a wider fabric of understanding but is pitifully
thin on its own. As long as you know that you are telling only one
part of the story, it is worth telling; no one can tell it all,
and it is probably the counsel of discretion to tell one part well
(reductionism in scope) rather than to tell all of it badly (reductionism
in method). But we tend to get caught up in our own models and to
believe that what we have decided to focus on really is
basic or central, and this can be misleading. Any analysis will
reduce the myth in some way, and one must be content to minimize
this danger while saying as much as possible that communicates a
useful insight into the material. One must not be terrorized by
the accusation of reductionism. (p.10)

from Asceticism and Eroticism in the Mythology of
Śiva:
(retitled Śiva: The Erotic Ascetic)

It is a time consuming task to sift through the Purānas
in search of the myths, but none of it is wasted labour, for the
mud is as valuable as the lotus which it nourishes: the myths come
alive only in the context of history, ritual, philosophy, and social
law. Hidden somewhere in this maze is the key to the Hindu world
view, vivid, startling, fascinating, and complex. The mythology
of Śiva forms only a small part of the material of the Purānas,
but it is an ideal model which reveals a pattern which pertains
to the material as a whole. Śiva is not only an extremely important
Hindu god, he is in many ways the most uniquely Indian god of them
all, and the principles which emerge from an intensive study of
his mythology lie at the very heart of Hinduism.

Can the mythology of Śiva be used to reveal a still more general,
perhaps universal, truth? Questions of this sort have long tempted
the student of mythology. It is an old maxim that we often find
our home truths in foreign lands. (p.1)

Yet the more reasonable goal—and the more rewarding—is
simply to understand the myths in situ, to use methods
which reveal the meanings that the Hindus saw in them, to enjoy
them as the exotic and delightful creations that they are.

To extract these meanings without reducing the myths in
any way is no simple task. The dilemma is at first complicated,
but ultimately resolved, by the fact that there are many ‘meanings’
in a Hindu myth:
‘Hindu mythology is much like a plum pudding. If you do not
like the plums in the slice you have, or have been deprived of a
favour, you may always cut another one.’ The first plum is
the story itself, usually a rather good story, occasionally of the
shaggy-dog variety but frequently with an immediately recognizable
point on at least one level, which might be termed the narrative
level. Closely related is the divine level, which concerns mythology
as it used to be understood by scholars of the classics: the metaphorical
struggles of divine powers and personalities. Above this is the
cosmic level of the myth, the expression of universal laws and processes,
of metaphysical principles and symbolic truths. And below it, shading
off into folklore, is the human level, the search for meaning in
human life, the problems of human society. (p.2)

Repetition enables the mythologist not only to separate the discrete
units but to distinguish the more important elements from the trivial.
The essential themes in a myth, impossible to identify from a simple
reading of one version, emerge upon consideration of a number of
other versions of that myth in which, despite various changes and
reversals, certain elements persist. What is important is what is
repeated, reworked to fit different circumstances, transformed even
to the point of apparent meaninglessness, but always retained. In
this way an element which occupies a relatively small part of a
particular myth may be shown, in the context of the mythology as
a whole, to be at the heart of that myth.

Multiple variants have a special importance in the analysis of myths
which, like the Saiva cycle, deal with contradictions. Myths which
contain an insoluble problem are particularly prone to proliferate
into many versions, each striving toward an infinitely distant solution,
no one version able to confess its failure outright. The perplexing
point, the crux, is constantly reworked in a vain attempt to find
an emotional or logical resolution. This is apparent on the simple
linguistic level as well, where false readings, alternative phrases,
and blatantly corrupt or incorrect Sanskrit terms betray a point
which the myth-maker did not himself understand but was unwilling
to omit altogether, knowing it to be somehow essential. (p.18)